No Constitutions In Private Institutions

            Once loose and unregulated, private institutions are gradually being held accountable to the Constitution.  Forcing private establishments to abide by the Constitution has increased ethnic, gender, and religious diversity in places of employment, schools, and organizations.  Minorities and disadvantaged groups are treated more favorably when companies and universities cannot make rules barring them from their institution.  Although these people benefit, the private institutions suffer a loss in efficiency.  Because the heads of private organizations must comply with the Constitution, they no longer have the freedom of choosing members solely based on their ability to benefit the organization.  Unrelated factors like race and disabilities quotas on the payroll complicate hiring decisions for employers.  Although some company policies are unconstitutional, executives use them anyways because they are efficient.  If members of an organization are unhappy with a policy, they can freely leave and join a group where they feel their constitutional rights are not violated.  Allowing private institutions to freely write policies will make their organization more efficient while preserving individual rights.

            Private institutions can hamper democracy if they are left to decide rules.  A score ago, when companies did have the right to make rules that violated the Constitution, women ended up getting underpaid for jobs even though they performed it as well as men.  Private institutions pursue profits, and they try to take many Constitutional shortcuts to do so, infringing the rights of their workers.  Ensuring constitutional compliance allows democracy to spread.  That is why the government discourages private golf courses from screening their members, sometimes only accepting males of a certain race.  Private recreation centers that enact unconstitutional policies like these are bad for democracy because it brews tension between genders and races.  By banning such discriminatory practices, the government avoids the formation of these race and gender exclusive parks that alienate ‘non-preferred’ groups.  If America wants to keep democracy, private organizations should not be allowed to make rules that violate the Constitution.

            Unfortunately though, strict adherence to the Constitution is no panacea for inequality.  Forcing some private institutions, such as businesses, to ‘go by the book’ infringes on their rights.  The Constitution makes it harder for employers to make decisions that work best for the company, thus violating the owner’s right to ‘pursuit of property’.  For example, the American Disabilities Act of 1990 prohibits job discrimination based on disability.  This act is especially harmful to small businesses, where forcing them to hire a single disabled person can effectively hurt production.  Handicapped people require more breaks, and their medication inhibits their ability to work at full capacity.  In a small business, this translates to higher losses for the employer.  To protect the right of the disabled while giving small businesses the freedom to hire whom they want, only larger corporations, where a single worker contributes insignificantly, should have to hire handicapped people.  Most small businesses should be allowed to use whatever screening method they want to maximize their profits.

Working hour limits is another example where rules of the Constitution conflicts with private interests.  Employers may want employees to work extra hours to meet increased demand.  However, because institutions cannot violate the worker’s ‘right to happiness’ (yes, this is what the Supreme Court argued), employers must hire and train new people on a temporary basis only to fire them when demand slackens.  It is more logical to have concurrent workers work extended hours.  In addition, some workers need extra income, and they rely on working overtime to make payments on their debt.  Regulating business practices may seem to protect the workers’ right to the “pursuit of happiness”, but in reality it hurts both them and their employers because neither is able to obtain their maximum output.

            If workers do not like the policies of their company, they always have the freedom of moving to another one.  As long as they have to right to move freely, regulating private institutions is an overkill.  Controlling private organizations is a waste of government resources, since individuals can simply leave companies that do not uphold their Constitutional beliefs.  Organizations that violate the Constitution will only hurt themselves because they lose members.  Of course, only private institutions should be able to make any rule they want.  Public places still have to fully abide by the Constitution.  This gives individuals a guaranteed fallback should they be discontent with the policies of private establishments. 

            Thus, there is no harm in giving private institutions the right to freely conduct policy- it only increases the operating efficiency of businesses and the government.  Small businesses will survive better if they are allowed to bypass Constitutional procedures.  Because it is still important to protect the rights won by previous legislation, public institutions should remain rigorously in accordance with the Constitution.  The government, being the nation’s largest employer, could employ those leaving the private sector instead of wasting money to track down unconstitutional company bylaws.  This compromise satisfies both parties: the heads of private institutions who are hindered by Constitutional red tape; and the individuals who demand a place of work that upholds their rights.  Forcing the Constitution into the private sector is like forcing a square peg into a round hole- it just doesn’t fit.

Reflection

            The prompt asked me to write an essay on whether or not the Constitution applies to private institutions.  It took a while for me to decide the layout of this essay, since I had to figure out the scope that the essay should take.  The nature of the prompt inherently promoted more freedom in deciding what to talk about.  I could either choose a more general, abstract approach by discussing the items of the constitutions and the nation’s founding principles.  I could also choose the second option of taking a specific, event-based approach and focus on one particular scenario.  Both ways had its merits, so I incorporated both into my essay.  The abstract methodology allowed me to pay attention to principles, which made the writing more dramatic.  Narrowing the essay down to one event facilitates the ability to pay attention to details.  More concrete analysis would make my point easier to understand.  In my essay, I utilized both methods to maximize the effectiveness of the paper.  I started with the general principles on the United States Constitution, outlining the right to private property and liberty.  The law was then tied to the idea that the government’s only purpose was to keep the businesses fair to each other.  Beyond that, the government has no role in regulating businesses.  In the second part, I narrowed down the scenario to a specific event relating to a corporation in order to make my thesis more comprehensible to the reader.  By the time the reader gets to this part, they would already have a basic, albeit adequate understanding of the issue at hand.  Thus, the time taken to explain an abstract principle was not wasted, but rather supportive, if not integrated into the latter part of the essay.  The last sentence of the essay is a cliché.  Although it serves its purpose of adding supportive commentary to the thesis, its generic style could be customized to add more interest to the paper.

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